Britain’s The Sun ran a photo of a topless woman on its page 3 Thursday, embarrassing competitors who reported all week that the tabloid had bowed to criticism and axed the tradition.

TwitterA photo of the Sun's page three posted on Twitter Thursday.

“I said that it was speculation and not to trust reports by people unconnected to The Sun,” the tabloid’s spokesman Dylan Sharpe wrote on Twitter. “A lot of people are about to look very silly.”

Earlier this week, news outlets declared an end to the The Sun’s 45-year-old topless model tradition — citing a report from the Times of London, which is also owned by media baron Rupert Murdoch’s newspaper group.

When those initial reports emerged on Monday, the tabloid would not comment on the story. Mr. Sharpe personally refused to discuss his newspaper’s “future plans” with The New York Times. But with a topless model back on its third page Thursday, the paper and its spokesman quickly derided competitors that had run the apparently false report.

“We would like to apologise on behalf of the print and broadcast journalists who have spent the last two days talking and writing about us,” read the caption in The Sun, under the headline “Clarifications and Corrections.”

“Further to recent reports in all other media outlets, we would like to clarify that on Page 3 of today’s Sun is a picture of Nicole, 22, from Bournemouth.”

Some U.K. observers dubbed the saga “a cheap PR stunt,” on account of The Sun’s decision to stay silent while the report snowballed into international news, The Telegraph reported.

Contacted on Thursday, Mr. Sharpe denied the allegation. He described the near-weeklong absence of topless models in the tabloid as part of a regular practice that sees editors swap the feature with photos of “a glamorous celebrity.”

I said that it was speculation and not to trust reports by people unconnected to The Sun. A lot of people are about to look very silly…

“I don’t see how it could be a PR stunt when I didn’t say anything on Monday, I didn’t say anything on Tuesday, I didn’t say anything on Wednesday,” he told the National Post. “If it was a PR stunt … by now I’d be telling you how brilliant I was.”

Mr. Sharpe said he was letting The Sun’s Thursday edition “speak for itself” and still would not confirm whether the feature is “staying or going.”

“Unless I say, or someone from The Sun says something has happened, it’s all speculation,” Mr. Sharpe said. “It isn’t my job to keep yours, or anyone else’s readers informed. My job is to make sure that The Sun’s readers are happy. You can report whatever you want, but unless you get official comment from me you’re just speculating.”

Asked why he decided not to correct the report when contacted by journalists, Mr. Sharpe replied: “Why should I?”

“Why do I have to tell The New York Times what The Sun is doing?” he said.

LONDON — Feminists are rejoicing at the disappearance of bare breasts from the British tabloid The Sun — though the newspaper is not saying whether the decision to ditch its “Page 3 girls” is permanent.

The Rupert Murdoch-owned tabloid has featured topless models on its third page for almost 45 years, but since Friday they have been replaced by models wearing bras or bikinis.

The Sun has declined to comment on the change, but the Murdoch-owned Times newspaper reported Tuesday that the feature had been dropped from the paper’s print edition. It said the Sun website would continue to feature topless models.

The Sun’s circulation has been declining for years as people switch to digital media, though it still sells about 2 million copies a day.

Page 3 was long seen as integral to the brand, but Murdoch has recently indicated that might be changing. The Sun’s Irish edition stopped using topless models in 2013. Last year Murdoch said he found Page 3 “old-fashioned, but readers seem to disagree.”

A protest campaign led by young women under the slogan “No More Page 3” has helped put pressure on Murdoch’s News Corp.

Campaigner Yas Necati said it was “about time” the newspaper dropped a feature that “gives the message that men make the news for what they do, and women for what they look like.”

The Conservative-led government’s education minister, Nicky Morgan, said the move was “a long-overdue decision and marks a small but significant step towards improving media portrayal of women and girls.”

But former Page 3 models spoke up in defence of topless tradition.

“This isn’t a triumph for feminism,” model Laura Lacole told the BBC. “This is a triumph for prudishness.”

]]>http://news.nationalpost.com/2015/01/20/goodbye-page-3-girls-british-sun-drops-topless-models-in-move-hailed-by-feminists/feed/2stdCopies of The Sun tabloid are displayed alongside other newspapers for sale in a shop in London, Tuesday, Jan. 20, 2015. Has the sun set on the topless models of Britain's tabloid press? For 45 years, the Rupert Murdoch-owned tabloid The Sun has featured topless models called Page 3 girls — photos that have long drawn protests from feminists.Tony Blair: The man Brits love to hate (partly because he won’t shut up)http://news.nationalpost.com/2015/01/06/tony-blair-the-man-brits-love-to-hate-partly-because-he-wont-shut-up/
http://news.nationalpost.com/2015/01/06/tony-blair-the-man-brits-love-to-hate-partly-because-he-wont-shut-up/#commentsTue, 06 Jan 2015 12:00:20 +0000http://news.nationalpost.com/?p=564540

Full Comment’s Araminta Wordsworth brings you a daily round-up of quality punditry from across the globe. Today: Why do so many people dislike Tony Blair?

The Brits are usually nice to their former prime ministers, however glad they may have been to turf them out of office. Harold Wilson, James Callaghan Margaret Thatcher, John Major, even Gordon Brown became tolerated, maybe revered with the passage of time.

Not so Blair, the architect of New Labour. He remains universally reviled at home, where his missteps are seized on gleefully. People point to his love of money, his cosying-up to repressive regimes and his preachiness as reasons for their dislike. Not for nothing has the satirical magazine Private Eye christened him The Vicar of St. Albans.

Brits also continue to feel they were lied to over Iraq — those infamous, nonexistent weapons of mass destruction. A YouGov poll in 2013 found almost half those polled considered him a war criminal. Then there are the persistent rumours of an affair with Wendi Deng, Rupert Murdoch’s then-wife (they divorced last year).

It’s partly because Blair can’t — or won’t — shut up, with rare exceptions. Most recently, he hit the headlines for comments on the party he once headed and its current leader, Ed Miliband, reports Peter Dominiczak at The Daily Telegraph.

Tony Blair has been forced to insist that he “fully supports” Ed Miliband after making a series of comments in which he suggested that the Labour leader is on course to lose the election.

The former prime minister has now said he “expects a Labour victory” in May’s general election.

His clarification came less than 24 hours after the publication of a damning interview in The Economist magazine in which Mr. Blair said that Mr. Miliband will not win the general election because he has veered too far to the left and has alienated British businesses

The Observer‘s Andrew Rawnsley believes in this case Blair was attacked for being right — Labour is unelectable, at present.

About some things, Tony Blair might not be the ideal person to approach for advice, especially at the fee level he charges. How to conduct wars in the Middle East. How to control your chancellor. How to burnish your post prime-ministerial reputation. But on one subject he has an excellent claim to be an expert. When it comes to how to win power, you’d think contemporary leaders might think the former prime minister worth paying a little heed to.

In a profile in Vanity Fair magazine, Sarah Ellison asks how the former PM reconciles his work for dubious regimes and big corporations with his aspirations to global leadership. (The answer seems to be: He is — and was — right about everything.)

Blair sees himself as pioneering something new: being the first prime minister who behaves like an American-style ex-president. In his pursuit of this role he has continued to weigh in on topics such as global terrorism and Iraqi politics. He has established a variety of philanthropic foundations. And, like Bill Clinton, he has set out to make some money, in his case aggressively pursuing business deals with autocratic governments around the world. Blair’s view of this is that one must be pragmatic—better to engage with unsavoury regimes, and maybe improve them a little, than not to do so at all. Better to take whatever money you can get with one hand, as long as you do good with the other. If you believe his motivations are pure, then he is trying to save the world by playing the role of a geopolitical Robin Hood.

It is an understatement to say that not everyone believes his motivations are pure. One man who does, however, is Tony Blair.

Rick Cohen in the Non Profit Quarterly suggests Blair may face further problems as a result of the U.S. Senate report on torture.

The mix of donors has a Bill Clinton-type of feel, except Clinton has never faced calls that he be tried as a war criminal, as Blair is now facing due to the release of the CIA torture report in the United States. Blair has already been dealing with the investigations (the Chilcot inquiries) by the British government over his handling of the Iraq invasion. Now Blair may have to answer questions about what he knew and when he knew it concerning the torture practices revealed by Senator Dianne Feinstein’s committee.

In The Economist interview, Anne McElvoy had the temerity to ask about Ms. Deng.

Mr. Blair roundly denies any impropriety. Asked whether he was (at least) careless about his reputation, he says calmly that it is “not something I will ever talk about — I haven’t and I won’t,” and then bangs his coffee cup so loudly into its saucer that it spills and everyone in the room jumps. But did he find himself in a tangle over his friendship with Ms. Deng? A large, dark pool of sweat has suddenly appeared under his armpit, spreading across an expensive blue shirt. Even Mr. Blair’s close friends acknowledge that the saga damaged him — not least financially, since Mr. Murdoch stopped contributing to Mr. Blair’s faith foundation and cut him off from other friendly donors in America.

Mazher Mahmood was 21 when he first posed as a wealthy sheikh. A reporter from Birmingham, England, intent on exposing a prostitution ring at a local hotel, he donned a white robe he had bought for £12 ($21) at an Islamic bookshop, checked into the hotel, the Metropole, and persuaded the concierge to send women to his room.

Three decades later, Mahmood owns at least a dozen sheikh outfits and a Rolex costing £5,000 ($8,885) to perfect his disguise. With an entourage of pretend bodyguards, assistants and even three stand-in sheikhs, the man known here as “the fake sheikh” has exposed drug deals, immigration fraud and, four years ago, one of the biggest match-fixing scandals in the history of cricket.

But he has also targeted second-tier celebrities, embarrassed royalty and baited a politician with anti-Semitic jokes. Under investigation on suspicion of perjury after a judge accused him of lying in court, Mahmood was suspended in July from the newspaper The Sun on Sunday.

He now faces the sort of public embarrassment that some of his targets once faced: Last week, the BBC aired a 30-minute documentary that included interviews with some of his former targets and assistants and, for the first time, high-definition footage of Mahmood himself.

Simon Dawson/BloombergA man reads a copy of the first Sunday edition of the Sun newspaper, The Sun on Sunday, at a cafe in a supermarket in Slough, U.K., Feb. 26, 2012.

In one instance highlighted in the documentary, he flew a 24-year-old model to the Canary Islands in 1996, promised her a lucrative modeling contract in the Middle East and then encouraged her to buy him cocaine from a dealer he had hired for that purpose. His article in the now-defunct tabloid News of the World branded her “a mob-connected drugs pusher.”

AP Photo/Lefteris PitarakisRebekah Brooks, former News International chief executive, arrives to talk to members of the media, in central London, Thursday, June 26, 2014. Brooks was acquitted after a long trial centreing on illegal activity at the heart of Rupert Murdoch's newspaper empire.

In Britain’s pantheon of notorious tabloid reporters, the “fake sheikh” is among the most notorious. Long a star in Rupert Murdoch’s British tabloid stable, Mahmood has become a symbol of the excesses of British journalism at a time when the country is still reeling from the fallout of the newspaper phone hacking scandal.

Since the scandal broke in 2011, more than 200 people have been arrested, among them private investigators, police officers and about 60 journalists. Rebekah Brooks, the head of Murdoch’s British newspaper business until 2011 and onetime editor of News of The World, was acquitted this year. But her successor as editor, Andy Coulson, was convicted, along with five others who had pleaded guilty. Last month, Ian Edmondson, a former news editor at the tabloid, was sent to jail for eight months. More cases are pending, including several concerning the bribery of public officials.

“The big picture here is that the commercial pressure to deliver stories that will sell the paper and make more money is an irresistible force in those newsrooms,” said Nick Davies of The Guardian and author of Hack Attack, about the scandal. “What it translates into is reporters’ being told, ‘Do whatever you need to do, and if that involves breaking the law, that’s OK.’”

“Mazher Mahmood is part of that culture of ruthlessness,” Davies added. “He was given free rein. He was given vast amounts of money to protect his identity as a fake sheikh. But often he is simply exposing people he has manipulated into doing something wrong.”

Bethany Clarke/Getty ImagesFormer News of the World editor and Downing Street communications chief Andy Coulson arrives at Old Bailey on June 12, 2014 in London, England.

In 1997, Mahmood put on his sheikh costume and offered a popular television actor film roles alongside Robert De Niro and Al Pacino. Footage from a meeting at the Savoy Hotel in London, obtained by the BBC, shows actor John Alford as he nervously declined both alcohol and drugs. But pressed to buy drugs for the sheikh, he eventually delivered a small amount of marijuana and cocaine and ended up in jail for nine months.

Jeff J Mitchell/Getty ImagesRespect Party MP George Galloway.

“I lost my house, I lost my career,” Alford told the BBC. “I’m lucky to be here. There were times when I’ve really thought of ending it. For the last 18 years, I’ve been through hell.”

More than 90 people have served jail time as a result of Mahmood’s reporting.

Now 51, Mahmood has denied any wrongdoing, saying that he used legitimate investigative methods. His lawyer, Angus McBride, called the BBC program “deeply misleading and inaccurate,” and he said it was not representative of his client’s work and should not have been allowed to air while he is under police investigation.

Mahmood tried to stop the BBC from revealing his identity, claiming that his life would be at risk. Twice, the program was delayed. But a judge ruled that there was not enough evidence to support this claim, pointing out that Mahmood had written his autobiography, Confessions of a Fake Sheik, under his real name. It was published in 2008 with photographs of the author that merely concealed his eyes with a thin black strip.

Others have tried to blow his cover: George Galloway, a left-wing British politician and supporter of the Palestinian cause, published Mahmood’s photo on his website in 2006 and accused Mahmood of disguising himself as an Arab businessman and trying to entice him to make anti-Semitic comments over lunch.

Besides the infamous sheikh, British tabloid journalism has featured Benji the Binman, who scavenged through celebrity trash cans, and Brooks, who once dressed as a cleaner and sneaked into the building of a rival newspaper to snatch a paper off the presses and match an exclusive report on the royal family.

HarperCollins UKMazher Mahmood published Confessions of a Fake Sheik, under his real name in 2008.

But Mahmood was a legend – and for the most part a respected one. He counted 500 exclusives at News of the World, where he worked for two decades, and won Reporter of the Year at the 1998 British Press Awards. His former editor at News of the World, Phil Hall, called him “the most diligent reporter we had.” After Murdoch shut the tabloid in 2011, a consequence of the scandal, Mahmood was hired by The Sun on Sunday, which was started a year later.

But since the phone hacking scandal, the tabloid atmosphere has changed.

Last year, Mahmood dressed up again, this time as a wealthy Indian film mogul. He flew singer Tulisa Contostavlos and two of her friends to Las Vegas first class and offered her a £3-million ($5.33 million) film contract for a role alongside Leonardo DiCaprio. Mahmood then pressed her to buy him cocaine. When she did, he wrote a front-page “world exclusive” in The Sun on Sunday: “X Factor star caught setting up secret deal with drugs pal.”

AP Photo/PA, Jonathan BradyFormer X Factor judge Tulisa Contostavlos arrives at Southwark Crown Court in London. The drug trial of Contostavlos collapsed after the judge said an undercover reporter known as the "Fake Sheikh" probably lied under oath.

But Contostavlos fought back and won. Dismissing the case in July, Judge Alistair McCreath said there were strong grounds to believe Mahmood had told him “lies” and had been “manipulating the evidence” in the case against Contostavlos. Since then, prosecutors have dropped a number of pending cases that relied on his evidence, and some of his former targets are planning to sue. Mahmood has been questioned by the police, his lawyer said.

“The actions of the fake sheikh are more far-reaching than phone hacking,” Mark Lewis, a lawyer representing some of Mahmood’s targets, said in an email. “People’s lives have been ruined. People have been sent to prison for committing crimes solicited by Mazher Mahmood.”

Lewis has called for an investigation into the role of law enforcement officials. He said the BBC program, watched by 2.5 million people last Wednesday, had made litigation inevitable.

“There will be some very worried people in the police, prosecution and at News Corp.,” he said. “Maybe one day we will have a free press in U.K. telling us what really happened.”

LONDON — “The historical novelist,” or so I once read, “must necessarily turn history into romance, and romance will always lie with the deposed or threatened king.” Same goes for the historical dramatist, as Shakespeare will bear witness. It goes, too, for the counter-historical dramatist, as is currently being demonstrated by Mike Bartlett, whose King Charles III is the prestige hit of London.

Or maybe Bartlett should be called a future-historical dramatist. The situation with which he presents us is that the Queen of England has just died and her son has, after a lifetime in waiting, succeeded to the throne. Immediately the new King Charles finds himself faced with a major crisis, of conscience and of state. In the wake of the recent phone-hacking scandals and of attacks on privacy generally, a bill has been passed that will effectively limit what has traditionally been regarded as the liberty of the press. All the bill needs to become law is the mere formality of the royal signature. At least, it’s always been assumed to be a formality. Charles, though, refuses to play. He takes the idea of press freedom seriously, even while admitting that he and his family have suffered from its abuse. He is also a student of history and knows that a monarch has one weapon left when facing an intransigent parliament. He can dissolve it.

Bartlett, whose best-known play in Canada is Cock, has done some clever things. He has seized on two issues on which most will have mixed feelings. One is censorship; we abhor it, and don’t want to see a government insulating itself against attacks from the media; we can still feel uneasy about some of the things those media can get away with.

The other is that strange institution known as a constitutional monarchy. Of course, we don’t want to see a democratically elected government subordinated to the whims of somebody whose position derives from mere hereditary accident. On the other hand, when we look at the antics of the elected, it’s hard not to yearn for somebody to at least knock their heads together. There’s a whole line of plays pitting king against cabinet, the elect against the elected; the most famous is Shaw’s The Apple Cart, whose King Magnus took the wind out of his opponents’ sails by threatening to abdicate and run against them. In Bartlett’s play, abdication is a threat to be used against the king. Shaw’s play is a comedy. So is Bartlett’s, and often a funny one, but it’s a comedy with the lineaments of tragedy.

It brings off this neat trick by dressing itself up stylistically as a Shakespearean chronicle play. Bartlett isn’t the most impeccable of pastiche artists, but he is sometimes eloquent and often trenchant. The style may be a stunt, but it sustains remarkably well.

King Charles III is a first-rate production by Rupert Goold

It’s a first-rate production by Rupert Goold. Tim Pigott-Smith, the official king, was sick when I attended but his understudy, Miles Richardson, was excellent. He’s the son of the late Ian Richardson, one of Britain’s best classical actors, and he seems to have inherited his father’s aquiline voice and manner, an air of being both vulnerable and aloof.

If ever a play was destined to be overtaken by events, this one is; but that’s all the more reason to enjoy it while it still seems plausibly prophetic. It should come to Canada, quick.

Like most interesting shows in the West End, it’s a transfer from a non-commercial house, the small independent Almeida. From the National Theatre, at the top of the subsidized heap, comes another state-of-the-nation play, uncompromisingly titled Great Britain. That’s about the only uncompromised thing about it. Where King Charles III alludes to the Rupert Murdoch empire hacking scandals that caused the closure of the News of the World, this play is wholly concerned with them, and tries in fact to dramatize them. The trouble is that the staged drama can hardly compete in farcical luridness with the real thing; the show strains mightily to pitifully small effect.

Related

It certainly has pedigree; it was staged by Nicholas Hytner, about to step down from a mostly glorious reign as the National’s artistic director, and its author is the insanely prolific Richard Bean, who wrote one of Hytner’s and the National’s most deserved successes, One Man Two Guvnors. His gagman’s touch only asserts itself in scenes involving a hapless police commissioner with gay proclivities, an Indian or maybe Pakistani accent, and a talent for inserting foot in mouth at press briefings. Otherwise all is laborious.

In Great Britain, Murdoch is now an Irishman, Rebekah Brooks is a minor character

Names in this play are changed, but where it counts identities are distinguishable. Murdoch is now an Irishman, Rebekah Brooks is a minor character, and the leading figure is a female journalist, given an unfortunate performance in which the actress seems as obnoxiously pleased with herself as the person she’s playing.

The character’s name is Kate Brittain, which should give an idea of the degree of subtlety on view here. Still, to judge from the fullness of their respective houses, while King Charles III is doing well, Great Britain is doing better. It makes you see the kebab man’s point.

]]>http://news.nationalpost.com/2014/10/31/robert-cushman-two-plays-in-londons-west-end-are-metrics-of-monarchy-and-the-modern-press/feed/0stdCharlesIII'Needs to be between us': Tony Blair offered to be an 'unofficial adviser' to Rupert Murdoch days before arrestshttp://news.nationalpost.com/2014/02/19/needs-to-be-between-us-tony-blair-offered-to-be-an-unofficial-adviser-to-rupert-murdoch-days-before-arrests/
http://news.nationalpost.com/2014/02/19/needs-to-be-between-us-tony-blair-offered-to-be-an-unofficial-adviser-to-rupert-murdoch-days-before-arrests/#commentsWed, 19 Feb 2014 15:47:13 +0000http://news.nationalpost.com/?p=429551

LONDON — Jurors at Britain’s phone-hacking trial were told Wednesday that former prime minister Tony Blair allegedly offered to work as an unofficial adviser to Rupert Murdoch as revelations of illegal phone hacking engulfed the mogul’s media empire.

Prosecutor Andrew Edis read aloud an email sent by Rebekah Brooks, then head of Murdoch’s British newspapers, to Murdoch’s son and deputy James on July 11, 2011.

She says he told her to “keep strong and definitely (take) sleeping pills.”

Brooks also writes that Blair “is available for you, KRM (Rupert Murdoch) and me as an unofficial adviser, but needs to be between us.”

Blair Daniel Acker / Bloomberg NewsRebekah Brooks, then head of British newspapers, said Tony Blair “is available for you, KRM (Rupert Murdoch) and me as an unofficial adviser, but needs to be between us.”

She also said Blair told her to set up an external committee into phone hacking, which would “publish a Hutton-style report.” The 2004 Hutton Report cleared Blair’s government of wrongdoing over its handling of intelligence about Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction.

Less than a week after sending the email, Brooks was arrested and charged with conspiring to hack phones, bribe officials and obstruct a police investigation.

All seven defendants deny charges of wrongdoing at Murdoch’s News of the World and Sun tabloids.

AP Photo / Alastair GrantFormer News of the World national newspaper editors Rebekah Brooks and Andy Coulson, shown arriving at The Old Bailey law court in London on Monday, Jan. 27, 2014, are on trial along with several others on charges relating to the hacking of phones and bribing officials while they were employed at the now closed tabloid paper.

The trials stems from 2011 revelations that News of the World employees eavesdropped on the voicemails of celebrities, politicians, sports figures, royalty and even a murdered 13-year-old girl. Murdoch closed the 168-year-old newspaper amid a wave of public outrage, and the scandal expanded to ensnare Britain’s establishment — exposing a cozy web of ties between powerful politicians, senior police and media executives.

Judge John Saunders said the defence case at the trial of Brooks and six others would open Thursday after a series of legal arguments Wednesday.

The Blair email is the latest twist in a trial that has produced more revelations than a stack of tabloid front pages.

Prosecutors allege that News of the World journalists, with consent from top editors, colluded to hack phones on a vast scale in a frenzy to get scoops. They say this happened when Brooks edited the newspaper from 2000 to 2003, and under Andy Coulson from 2003 to 2007. Coulson, who became Prime Minister David Cameron’s communications chief, is also on trial.

The defence does not dispute that hacking took place. Three former News of the World news editors have pleaded guilty, as has Glenn Mulcaire, a private investigator employed by the newspaper.

It’s the scale that is striking. A police witness told the court he found evidence that the News of the World hacked the phone accounts of 282 people 6,813 times. Mulcaire was paid about 100,000 pounds (now about $168,000) a year — largely, prosecutors say, for his phone-hacking prowess.

Jurors heard about efforts to hack the telephones of Prince Harry, Kate Middleton and royal aides, as well as of senior politicians and celebrities including Paul McCartney.

The defence will try to convince jurors that Brooks and Coulson were unaware of the practice, and that as busy editors they were not individually responsible for every story.

Simon Dawson / Bloomberg Glenn Mulcaire is a former private investigator who worked for News Corp.'s News of the World tabloid.

Police have already revealed that Mulcaire sought to hack the phones of Brooks and Coulson. Coulson’s lawyer, Timothy Langdale, has asked the jury to consider how his client could be “both conspirator and victim at the same time.”

Brooks and Coulson also face charges of conspiring to bribe public officials for information.

Several celebrities whose private lives were exposed by the tabloids have already testified in the trial. Actors Jude Law and Sienna Miller recounted how their relationship — and Miller’s fling with Daniel Craig — became headline news.

The private lives of Brooks and Coulson also made the front pages, when prosecutors revealed that the pair had a secret six-year affair covering a period when hacking took place. Prosecutor Andrew Edis said he was not seeking to be salacious, but disclosed details of their relationship to show that “what Mr. Coulson knew, Mrs. Brooks knew too.”

At times the evidence had touches of a spy film — or a farce.

Prosecutors used phone records, recovered emails and security-camera footage to reconstruct the day before Brooks’ arrest in 2011, when they say Brooks, her husband Charles and others conspired to hide notebooks, computers and other evidence from police.

A security man, pretending to deliver pizzas, hid some of the items in a garbage bag behind trash bins in the parking garage at the couple’s London apartment. He then sent a text to his superior — adapting a quote from the war movie “Where Eagles Dare” — that read, “Broadsword calling Danny Boy: The pizza is delivered and the chicken is in the pot.”

A cleaner found the stashed items and handed them to police. Among the items in a briefcase belonging to Charles Brooks were a Wimbledon souvenir program, the newsletter of the British Kunekune Pig Society and several pornographic DVDs.

The jury has already heard from dozens of witnesses — including detectives, journalists, royal aides and movie stars — and sifted through vast amounts of evidence, from recorded voicemail messages to telephone records, emails and payment details.

Judge John Saunders has told jurors they will most likely be sent to consider their verdicts in mid-May.

The man at the center of the maelstrom sat across from the parents of a dead girl, his head cradled in his hands. He rocked slightly. I’m sorry, he kept saying. I’m so sorry.

He was tanned and reasonably fit, with closely cropped hair that he had allowed to assume its natural gray color. He wore a perfectly cut pinstripe suit and a sharp gray tie, befitting talismans of his status as a commanding corporate chieftain. The people gathered in an expansive suite at the luxury hotel One Aldwych in the heart of London, a five-star stop that catered equally to Saudi investors and Hollywood celebrities, were all fixed on Rupert Murdoch.

The billionaire was used to being the focus of attention among the powerful, whether they were asking for favors or complaining about the way he ran the English-speaking world’s most important media empire. Some competitors could boast a greater market value than Murdoch’s News Corp. None was more influential. Murdoch had become a man beyond states, someone who sliced Gordian knots rather than trying to untangle them, a self-styled buccaneer with little but contempt for self-satisfied establishment worthies or narrow-minded government regulators.

Like one of his own satellites floating above the earth, by 2012 Rupert Murdoch floated above the borders and limitations of the practices, laws, and folkways of mere nations. His company served millions of readers and viewers on five continents, with a strong presence in the English-language powers of Australia, the United Kingdom, and the United States, as well as in China, Europe, India, and Latin America.

Murdoch had long ago become one of Britain’s most powerful figures and cast an even greater shadow in his native Australia. Through the New York Post, his company enforced a kind of discipline among politicians who hoped to operate in the largest city in the United States. Through Fox News and the Wall Street Journal, his journalists shaped popular and elite currents within the Republican Party in the States. And with its movie studios and its broadcast, cable, and satellite TV ventures, News Corp had the financial muscle to ride out losses elsewhere in the empire.

He had used flattery, disdain, and even remoteness to handle presidents, prime ministers, and popes. He had granted audiences to the aspirants and pretenders seeking to join those ranks. To encounter the ordinary people his publications had wronged was a rare event.

Yet here Rupert Murdoch sat, human, even vulnerable. What else could he be, given the other people in the room? Bob Dowler was an IT consultant with a thin crown of white hair, an imposing presence, and an impassive expression. His wife, Sally, her face pinched and gaunt, was a teacher. They were in their fifties, roughly the same age as Murdoch’s daughter from his first marriage. And they had endured unimaginable pain, partly because of one of his most famous properties.

The Dowlers’ daughter Milly had been a 13-year-old with a quick smile. She was a saxophone fan who liked to gossip about boys with her older sister, Gemma. On March 21, 2002, dressed in classic British school uniform — blazer, Oxford shirt, and skirt — she left her school in the Surrey countryside at seven minutes past three in the afternoon. Twenty minutes later, she was on a train home. She got off at her stop. A witness spotted her a hundred yards away at about six minutes past four. After that, Milly was never seen again.

For most of 2002, Milly’s parents and sister had no idea what had happened to her. The disappearance became fodder for hundreds of headlines speculating on her fate. The police focused on exactly the wrong clues, poring through Milly’s journal writings for proof of tension between the parents. They looked for evidence of conflict between the two sisters: Gemma was the favorite, Milly wrote. The absent girl was unhappy. Perhaps she had run away. Some investigators fixated on her father’s claimed interest in pornography.

The outcome was as gruesome as any tabloid editor could imagine. Milly’s bones were found months later, dumped in woodlands. It took until June 2011 for prosecutors to try and convict a man for her killing. Police had missed earlier clues tying Milly’s death to the man, who had been found guilty in two previous deaths.

The Dowlers’ pain and anger were heightened by the disclosure that people working for Murdoch’s News of the World had hacked into Milly’s cell phone voice mail messages to mine them for fodder. Even in death, her privacy had been violated. The Dowlers’ phones had been targeted, too.

They were not the only ones. In late 2005, aides to princes William and Harry had asked police to investigate whether their phones had been hacked. Two men working for the News of the World — the royals editor and a private investigator — were convicted and sent to jail. Celebrities, politicians, and sports stars were added to a growing list of people who had been targeted in the intervening years. But few in the United Kingdom and no one outside it cared until the Dowlers, an ordinary family who had faced a prolonged and extraordinary grief over their dead daughter, were shown to have been victimized as well.

The public fury struck at the heart of Murdoch’s media empire

The police swung into high gear, while politicians who had sought Murdoch’s blessing lined up to denounce him in Parliament. Rival newspapers that had largely turned a blind eye to such behavior by the Murdoch press (and some of its rivals) turned on News Corp, which sold approximately two of every five national newspapers purchased by readers. The nation rose as one in revulsion.

The public fury struck at the heart of Murdoch’s media empire — at some of his much-beloved newspaper properties that were the financial cornerstones of his print business and were supervised by some of his most trusted lieutenants and likely heirs. Britain had been the launching pad for Murdoch’s international growth beyond his native Australia. The scandal-driven tabloids News of the World and the Sun served as his financial base to buy two of the nation’s most respected papers, the Times of London and the Sunday Times, as well as to expand into the United States.

His second son, James, his presumed successor and the company’s third-ranking executive, held responsibility for the company’s operations in the United Kingdom. Rupert ran News Corp like a family business, though its shares were publicly traded on NASDAQ. Together with his adult children, Murdoch controlled roughly 40% of News Corp’s voting shares. He had made it clear that the next leader of the company (perhaps after a brief caretaker period) would be someone who shared his last name.

Anthony Bolant/REUTERS<strong>By Jamie Portman</strong>
The people behind Disney’s <em>The Lion King</em> didn’t know they were creating a masterpiece back in the early 1990s.
Neither did they expect it to become one of the most beloved animated movies of all time. Even now, 17 years later, producer Don Hahn remembers his astonishment over what happened.
“It was regarded as the B movie when we were doing it,” he recalls. “People were flocking to the other movies we were working on at the studio. This was seen as an experimental film and a kind of second-tier film.”
With <em>The Lion King</em> set to return to the big screen Sept. 16 — in 3D, no less — and with its much-anticipated Blu-ray release happening at the start of October, it will be reuniting with old fans and also seeking new audiences. Hahn is excited over these prospects for a legendary film cited by Disney as the highest-grossing animated film of all time, but he still remembers what a huge gamble it seemed to be back in 1994.<!--more-->
“Having a rock star [Elton John] do the music was unconventional. So was doing a movie set in Africa with no human characters. But then, I think we started to see three or four months before the movie was released that it was a good movie, and we started to share that with the press, and they started to tell us that it was a great movie.
“We worked really hard on it, and we tried to make it something special and unique, to take risks, and do the best we could. It’s always flattering and humbling that people liked it — but no, we didn’t see any of this coming.”
But Hahn is quick to emphasize that <em>The Lion King</em> was, and is, a triumph of hand-drawn animation, an art form that some in the industry see as obsolete, thanks to the computer revolution. Furthermore, Hahn wants to correct any perception that the adventures of Simba and his friends have in some way been converted into computer-generated imagery.
The bottom line with the Blu-ray editions and the film’s big-screen rebirth in 3D is that the integrity of the original has been protected at all times.
In fact, Hahn joined forces with directors Rob Minkoff and Roger Allers to monitor every single image of the film during the 3D conversion process. He knows there have been complaints from purists, but he says they should wait until they see the movie.
“The most important thing to me was to involve the original filmmakers. Hand-drawn animation is nothing to run away from. I think it’s something to celebrate. It’s a beautiful art form, and we wanted to sustain it. It never ever crossed anybody’s mind to turn it into something that would be considered a CG [computer-generated] movie.”
<em>The Lion King</em> is returning to theatres two months after Disney’s hand-drawn <em>Winnie the Pooh</em> premiered in theatres to the best reviews of any animated film so far released this year. “That’s something we’re really proud of,” Hahn says. “This is a great art form, and there’s no need to be anything other than celebratory about it.”
He sees the return of<em> The Lion King</em> as an occasion for celebration, as well, and is delighted with how it looks in 3D. After all, it serves the filmmakers’ vision of achieving in animated form the sort of epic sweep you might expect from a David Lean film.
“We wanted Africa to be part of the film. Just as in<em> Lawrence of Arabia</em>, the landscape was the star of that film,” Hahn says. Which is another reason why the studios wanted <em>The Lion King</em> back in cinemas.
“<em>The Lion King</em> hasn’t been on the big screen for 17 years,” Hahn says. “There’s a generation of kids who haven’t seen it in a theatre, and, meanwhile, technology’s kind of caught up with us so we can take a hand-drawn movie and convert it to 3D and actually have it look decent.”
Furthermore, the film hasn’t even been available on home entertainment for nearly eight years, so the studio has taken the opportunity to bring it out for the first time on Blu-ray.
“This is very much in the tradition of what Walt Disney used to do with his films,” Hahn points out. “Every seven years, <em>Snow White</em> would come out, or <em>Fantasia</em> would come out, to a new audience. That’s what’s driving this: to take a new audience and expose it to this movie again in the best possible way.”
Robert Neuman, the 3D stereographer in charge of the conversion process, says he has a daughter who has probably viewed <em>The Lion King</em> 100 times. “Now this will give her the opportunity to see the film again — but with fresh eyes.”
It took Neuman and his team four months to complete the conversion. Neuman reviewed 1,197 individual scenes and created a “3D script” for the entire film. This was done to map out the depth of individual 3D effects in order to enhance the emotion of each scene.
In using technology to “sculpt depth” into a scene, Neuman was constantly making decisions as to how much was appropriate. He says that 3D always has to be used intelligently — because extremes can be wearing on the audience.
“A depth score of 10 is the maximum amount of depth I can give to meet comfort levels,” he says. “You have to achieve a balancing act between immersion and comfort. It’s like marathon running. If you were to run at the same speed always, you would never make it to the finish line. Marathon runners get there by modulating their speed. It’s the same when you must mirror what’s happening emotionally in the film.”
The top priority for Neuman was to honour the glory of traditional hand-drawn animation.
“The beauty of that is what audiences respond to when they see the great classic animated features. But if you take this traditional animated film and put it into a stereoscopic space, it all of a sudden takes on this new life. It has all the character of the original <em>Lion King</em>, but now it has this more tangible quality. It feels like an entirely new thing. And it doesn’t feel like [computer-generated imagery].”

Those few days in July shattered many assumptions. How could News of the World function when police were treating its newsroom as a crime scene? What to do about the CEO of Murdoch’s British properties, Rebekah Brooks, or her predecessor, Les Hinton, the man Murdoch had handpicked to publish the Wall Street Journal after decades of devoted service? Rupert Murdoch, although famous for his loyalty, could be ruthless when threatened.

Meanwhile, the company’s $14-billion takeover of the United Kingdom’s largest cable broadcaster had been cast deeply into doubt. And the standing of James Murdoch, the executive chairman of News Corp in Britain, Europe, and Asia, was imperiled as well. James’s older brother — Lachlan — had once been the heir apparent, but he retreated to Australia in the face of vicious political fighting with some of Murdoch’s senior executives. Amid the tabloid crisis, Lachlan flew to New York and then London to be at his father’s side for strategy meetings. But he did not want to rejoin the company, even in a senior role. He enjoyed the freedom of distance from his father and the ability to lead his own, smaller media company back in Sydney. The boys had never taken their sister Elisabeth seriously as a possible future CEO for the company, largely because their father didn’t see her in that light. But her outsider status was looking stronger with each passing day, as James’s failure to head off this crisis seemed increasingly disastrous for the company.

Murdoch was accompanied to the hotel by Will Lewis, a senior British News Corp executive who had previously been editor of the rival Telegraph newspaper. Everyone at that meeting with the Dowlers knew an out-of-court settlement would ultimately ensue. The logic was inescapable. The revelation that the paper had broken into the phone of a dead girl, barely a teenager, transformed the issue of cell phone hacking in the public’s eye from a bit of naughtiness, a lark, to something that frightened the general public. If it could happen to Milly, it could happen to anyone, however innocent and removed from the crosshairs of gossip reporters chasing after celebrity fluff.

So some sort of deal made every sense. But at this meeting no one raised the question of money. The Dowlers’ lawyer, Mark Lewis, gestured for people to sit down. (The two Lewises are not related.) Mark Lewis and the Murdoch camp shared a secret that was about to become public: Executives for News International, the British wing of News Corp, had assigned journalists and private eyes to follow him hopes of uncovering some personal transgression they could use against him and his clients. Murdoch’s company was publicly contrite. But privately it had been playing rough.

I know about you, Mark Lewis told Murdoch. I know your mother is still alive. She’d be ashamed of you for what you’ve done.

Georgia Nicols' daily horoscopes: May 27, 2014<strong>Moon Alert</strong>
Caution: Avoid shopping or making important decisions all day. The Moon is in Taurus.
<strong>Aries (March 21-April 19)</strong>
Although your focus is probably on financial matters today, do not do anything important. Avoid important decisions and definitely, avoid major purchases. (It's okay to buy food or gas.) Your productivity at work might suffer while you deal with shortages and delays. (Sigh.)
<strong>Taurus (April 20-May 20)</strong>
The Moon is still in your sign today; however, today is a Moon Alert day. This could make you feel spacey and disconnected. You might also lack motivation and feel like it's just a goofy day, which, in fact, it is. But it's a good day to relax and be creative. Enjoy yourself!
<strong>Gemini (May 21-June 20)</strong>
In a word - this is a goofy day. It's hard to get motivated and it's hard to accomplish anything. Therefore, don't beat yourself up. Lower your expectations. However, the upside is you are very much in ouch with your muse and can be oh so creative and original!
<strong>Cancer (June 21-July 22)</strong>
Relations with females will be lighthearted but a bit unpredictable today. But lighthearted is the key. Avoid important decisions. Do not agree to anything important. Just schmooze with others and enjoy yourself. Wait until Friday if you can. Do not shop today.
<strong>Leo (July 23-Aug. 22)</strong>
Be careful because today you are in a high viz. role, relatively speaking, and yet, you might make a goofy mistake or do something you later regret. Therefore, think before you speak or act, especially with bosses, parents, teachers, VIPs and the police.
<strong>Virgo (Aug. 23-Sept. 22)</strong>
Avoid important decisions today. Instead, give yourself the freedom to enjoy new places and meet new faces. Your appreciation of beauty might be heightened, which is why you will enjoy parks, art galleries, museums and gorgeous, architectural buildings.
<strong>Libra (Sept. 23-Oct. 22)</strong>
Be careful because your focus today is on shared property, inheritances, insurance matters and anything to do with the wealth or debt that you share with others. However, this is a poor day to make important decisions regarding these matters. Don't do it. Wait until Friday.
<strong>Scorpio (Oct. 23-Nov. 21)</strong>
Be accommodating with others today. (Actually, you have no choice.) Be comforted by the fact that in two weeks, when the Moon is in your sign, others will have to compromise with you and accommodate you. (After the game the King and the Pawn go back in the same box.)
<strong>Sagittarius (Nov. 22-Dec. 21)</strong>
Your desire to get better organized will be frustrated today, of this I am quite sure. Therefore, lighten up and lower your expectations of yourself and others. Go with the flow when you experience shortages and delays. It's just what it is. (Friday is a strong day.)
<strong>Capricorn (Dec. 22-Jan. 19)</strong>
This is a creative, inventive day for you. Write down your ideas or grab any opportunity to express your creative urges. Unfortunately, we often think that only professionals can express their talents. But you are a verb, not a noun. The magic is in the doing.
<strong>Aquarius (Jan. 20-Feb. 18)</strong>
This is the perfect day to relax at home if you can. Without doubt, your focus is on home, family and private matters right now. But on top of this, today is a goofy, spacey day. Lower your expectations. Just deal with what is necessary.
<strong>Pisces (Feb. 19-March 20)</strong>
This is a good day for writers, actors and people who want to express themselves. It's a poor day for important decisions, agreements or signing documents. Don't volunteer for anything. Postpone whatever you can until tomorrow or better yet, Friday. Enjoy lighthearted banter with siblings and daily contacts.
<strong>If Your Birthday Is Today</strong>
Actor Paul Bettany (1971) shares your birthday today. You are naturally sophisticated. It's as if you were born with style and panache. You are fun-loving and have a great sense of humour; but you are also hard-working. You are individualistic and have original views. This year offers you promises, opportunities and choices. Do not over extend yourself in the first half of the year. Save your money and cut expenses.

Dame Elisabeth Murdoch was then 102, by consensus the con- science and chief patron of the Australian port city of Melbourne, Rupert’s birthplace. The media baron assented but then changed the emphasis. My father. He’d be ashamed. Keith Murdoch had led one of Australia’s most influential media companies. At his death his young son Rupert inherited a small paper in a forgotten city. Mention of his father seemed to change Rupert’s mood. His shame melted and he found himself repeating a signature complaint that had motivated him throughout his career.

My father was a great newspaperman, Keith Murdoch’s son said ruefully in the London hotel room. The British never gave him his due.

It was absolutely irrelevant to the people in the room, a strange aside, an echo of old battles called to mind by his father’s ghost that he had summoned unwittingly to the conference.

Although they lived in different worlds, the couple sitting in that hotel room and the billionaire shared one experience: parenthood. The Dowlers were still grieving, just days after the conviction of their girl’s killer, and they were freshly wounded by learning of the tabloid’s invasion of her privacy. Murdoch was attempting to salvage his son James’s destiny.

Murdoch was tired, from flying and from the pressure he faced. New allegations claimed that his reporters sought to hack the phones of victims of the September 2001 terror attacks in New York City. If the scandal spread to the United States, it could prove catastrophic to his control of the company. The news magnate who was famously obsessive about details — down to headlines, story selection, and photo captions — appeared out of touch when it mattered most. James, far from being able to shield his father, had left him and News Corp vulnerable to shame and ridicule.

Gemma Dowler spoke directly to Murdoch on behalf of her parents and dead sister. When her sister disappeared, Gemma had been a round-faced 16-year-old studying for the standardized tests that would get her into college. In the intervening nine years she had received a rough education about the cruelties of crime, the justice system, and the press. She took the time to admonish the media mogul.How would you have felt if it had happened to someone in your family? He sat with his head in his hands.

Darren Stone / Postmedia News

In the space of a few days much of his record had come under assault, and Murdoch’s character was also being questioned. Was his cowboy style a quirk, a key component of his success, or a fundamental defect that had led to this very moment? Was he guilty, complicit, or, as he suggested, a bystander to this raft of cruelties?

When he finally emerged blinking into the July sunlight on the marble steps of the hotel, Murdoch was confronted by a scrum of reporters and photographers and video camera operators, some of them his own. “As founder of the company, I was appalled to find out what had happened,” Murdoch said. “I found that out, I apologized. I have nothing further to say.” Later he would tell members of Parliament, his own reporters, and a judicial inquiry that he had been betrayed by those in whom he put his trust, as well as by the people they in turn had trusted.

But it was not clear whether those people, his reporters, editors, and lawyers, had betrayed the nature of the company he had engineered from his father’s modest bequest. The uproar that ensued from the disclosure about the hacking of the voice mail messages of Milly Dowler and others arose from a creeping understanding of the culture of News Corp, based primarily on the qualities of one man.

Rupert Murdoch’s company embraced a buccaneering spirit to create new fortunes, and it was built on personal and family ties more than most, with a clubbiness, or mateship, that was almost impossible for outsiders to penetrate. The scandals of 2011 revealed that culture had also become untethered from the well-being of the people it claimed to serve.

NEW YORK — Media baron Rupert Murdoch and his soon-to-be-ex-wife said they were parting with “mutual respect” Wednesday after telling a judge they had reached a divorce deal.

The chairman of News Corp. and 21st Century Fox and his wife of 14 years, Wendi Deng Murdoch, shook hands and briefly hugged after a brief proceeding in a Manhattan court. The terms of the agreement weren’t disclosed in court.

“We are pleased to announce that we have reached an amicable settlement of all matters relating to our divorce,” the two said in a statement released through a publicist. “We move forward with mutual respect and a shared interest in the health and happiness of our two daughters.”

While key terms of the divorce agreement were not released, a person familiar with the settlement told Reuters that Deng is expected to keep the couple’s home in Beijing and their Fifth Avenue apartment in Manhattan, purchased for a then-record US$44 million in 2004.

The divorce isn’t technically final; it will happen after state Supreme Court Justice Ellen Gesmer signs some yet-to-be-submitted paperwork. She told the couple Wednesday she was “glad that you have been able to resolve these matters amicably.”

The two answered Gesmer’s yes-and-no questions about whether they understood and approved an agreement ending their marriage. Asked whether he was satisfied with the agreement, Rupert Murdoch replied in a strong voice, “Yes, your honour.”

The settlement is largely based on two prenuptial agreements and two “postnuptial” agreements that modified the original agreements, a person familiar with the situation said Tuesday, speaking on condition of anonymity because the matter is personal.

The divorce will end a third marriage for Rupert Murdoch, 82, who got his start in his family’s newspaper business in his native Australia and built a global media conglomerate. Forbes pegged his and his family’s wealth at US$13.4 billion in September.

Murdoch’s News Corp. split this year into two companies: the journalism and publishing portion, still called News Corp., and the more profitable film and TV unit, 21st Century Fox. Both are publicly traded and based in New York.

The divorce won’t affect control of the companies or the succession plan for them. Rupert Murdoch controls them through a family trust that benefits his four children from previous marriages — Prudence, Elisabeth, Lachlan and James. The latter three have had active roles in the companies.

Upon Rupert Murdoch’s death, all four will have an equal say in what happens to the roughly 38 per cent voting stock the trust holds in both companies.

He and Wendi Deng Murdoch, 44, have two school-age daughters, Grace and Chloe. They are beneficiaries of 8.7 million non-voting shares being held in a separate trust. Wendi Deng Murdoch is not a shareholder, according to the person familiar with the situation.

Born in China, Wendi Deng Murdoch is a Yale graduate who worked as a junior executive at News Corp.’s subsidiary Star TV in Hong Kong, where she met her now-husband at a 1997 cocktail party. She left Star TV before marrying the media mogul in 1999 aboard Murdoch’s private yacht, in New York.

She produced the 2011 movie “Snow Flower and the Secret Fan,” released by News Corp.’s Fox Searchlight.

Wendi Deng Murdoch literally leaped into the spotlight when she jumped up to smack a protester who was throwing a cream pie at her husband during a 2011 British parliamentary hearing into phone hacking by News Corp. newspapers.

The couple had residences in New York, London, Beijing and elsewhere that were the subject of negotiations in their divorce.

Related

Murdoch, who recently made headlines for his divorce from wife Wendi Deng, also becomes the new owner of the winery’s 7,500-square-foot, which boasts the notable distinction of having once been owned by Gone With the Wind director Victor Fleming. The purchase also includes a guest house, staff quarters and a tasting room – in addition to an existing $4-million in wine inventory. Murdoch’s purchase of Moraga has been pending since May, as Murdoch was waiting to have a California liquor license approved:

About to celebrate buying beautiful small vineyard right in LA. Great wine, Moraga, owned by great Angelino, Tom Jones. Time cover,1961!

Moraga Vinyards was the first commercial winery in to be bonded to the city of Los Angeles following the end of Prohibition in 1933, according to a report in Forbes. The winery currently produces Cabernet, Merlot, Petit Verdot, Cabernet Franc and Sauvignon Blanc varietals.

I know I have lived a dull life, 57 years with the same man, each of us such a model of fidelity. Actually we both realize what we have missed when we read about Rupert and Wendi Murdoch, Nigella Lawson the cook and her art-collector husband Charles Saatchi, Anthony Weiner and his wife Huma, who is a close-to of Hillary Clinton. Apparently President Clinton, in case we have all forgotten, had some sort of sex act performed on him by White House intern Monica … what is her last name? You see how time flies with scandals, I’ve forgotten. Drabinsky,
Lewinsky, whatever.

It seems that being compared with Weiner repels President Clinton. Since I’m not exactly handy with the Internet, I never quite understood what Weiner did. Of course, I do know he exposed some part of his body and sent dirty words to women unknown to him, some of whom replied. One of the women who was happy to reply said her last name was Leathers. Makes sense.

Related

Personally, I find him repulsive and was horrified to see he was doing well running as a candidate for mayor in New York. I would be perfectly content to send our Toronto Mayor Ford to New York to replace him. Certainly Rob Ford is the better man. It would be an act of generosity, hands across the border and all that, to help New Yorkers replace the slimy Weiner.

I have never met Mr. or Mrs. Weiner, though I have had a nodding acquaintance with a member or two of the other newsworthy divorces which are currently public fodder. My husband was at Christ Church Oxford with Nigel Lawson, father of the celebrated food writer Nigella, and knew him pretty well. The reason they became sort of friends was that Christ Church (a college) was at that time a little bit anti-Semitic and the only Jews there were Allan from Winnipeg and Nigel, whose father was a tea merchant from London. Nigel became a member of Thatcher’s cabinet (chancellor of the exchequer) and might have become prime minister if he hadn’t ceased to amuse Margaret. He had a beautiful wife who left him for a philosopher, last name Ayer, but not before she gave birth to Nigella.

So what did happen in Scott’s restaurant in London where Nigella and her billionaire husband, art collector Charles Saatchi, were dining? Observers in the restaurant claimed he tried to throttle her several times during a conversation about his or her or their children. I don’t know if they had children together. Perhaps Googling will enlighten me, but I’m too lazy. When hearing this accusation (there was video) he said that he was only trying to take some snot out of her nose. Shortly afterwards, she moved out of the house but still wanted to work things out with the marriage. But he called a newspaper and told them he was divorcing her. Apparently this was news to her. I like her cookbooks better than his art. So I am on her side and hope she gets a pile of money out of him as well as many happy days. Besides I met her father and mother, so I’m biased.

Then there are the Murdochs. What is my connection to Wendi and Rupert?

Practically nil, except I sat next to him at a dinner in Washington. And he was perfectly civil instead of being the megalomaniac media mogul who approved of a newspaper culture in which his reporters tapped young murdered girls’ cellphones. I thought he should go to jail for that but I don’t think his underlings who were involved will ever be punished. I met his second wife Anna, with whom he stayed for 31 years. Anna and I bumped into each other on a book tour and she had me to lunch in her art deco house in Los Angeles. Less than a month after her divorce was finalized from Rupert, he married Wendi Deng. Now he’s 82 and she’s 44. It was Rupert who began divorce proceedings with Wendi. Anna gave Rupert three children and got a settlement that seemed to please her — when her husband left her to marry Wendi less than a month after the divorce finalized.

Apparently Anna wanted him to retire and eat vegetables. Happily, Anna remarried a banker. I don’t know if she cares if Wendi is surprised by the divorce. From what I could tell, Anna was a kind, easygoing woman who stole Rupert from his first wife and managed to last out 31 years. When I met her she was still married to Rupert and she spoke of him in the manner of a happy loving wife. You never can tell.

What do we know about marriages? Not much, except all the women I speak to think Huma should definitely leave Anthony.

NEW YORK — Wendi Deng has recruited a formidable New York lawyer to handle her divorce from Rupert Murdoch, indicating that she may be poised to drive a hard bargain from the billionaire media tycoon.

Despite being bound by a prenuptial agreement, Miss Deng has hired William Zabel, an expert in estates and family law, who has represented several women in their divorces from wealthy businessmen.

Mr. Zabel, 76, has warned that “there is no guarantee” that a prenuptial deal will spare a couple a costly and acrimonious split. “In fact, its validity often becomes a separate, hotly contested legal issue,” he said.

Last month Mr. Murdoch, the 82-year-old chairman of News Corporation, filed for divorce from Miss Deng, his 44-year-old wife of 14 years, in New York, where the couple share a penthouse.

Together — forming the most scintillating six-degrees you’ll find in the global jet-set — they’ve given 2013 quite the arc, with Private Eye in the U.K. combining their two incredible sagas (her divorce from Rupert Murdoch, and her sudden dissolution from Charles Saatchi) into one inevitable, you-knew-it-was-coming headline: “IT’S THE SUMMER OF LOVE!” So reads that particular issue, complete with photos from happier times and Eye-ish speech bubbles.

“We’re not getting on,” Rupert’s head smirks, to which Wendi, the erstwhile ultimate Asian trophy wife, snaps back, “Well, you are!” Nigella, meanwhile, gazes into a distance, while her estranged Richie Rich, Charles, bemoans, “I was only choking.”

True Blood? Dexter? Who needs ’em? These are the summer serials to watch. Even Under the Dome, the hit CBS event based on the Stephen King novel, can’t keep up with the disaster drama here.

screenshot

Exhibit A: The international media baron and his Wendi (born in Eastern China at the height of Mao’s revolution, with the name Deng Wenge — literally, cultural revolution) who’d transformed herself from intern to Mrs. Murdoch, eventually setting off headlines for famously blocking a pie attack on her husband in the midst of a parliamentary testimony

Exhibit B: The advertising god, who’d already helped morph a grocer’s daughter into a prime minister and later moved on to play Svengali to a burgeoning home cook, helping re-brand her into the “domestic goddess,” all along torching this into A Star is Born tale where her fame eventually outpaced his. (Nota bene: Charles and Nigella’s courtship began in a celebrity resto — The Ivy — and came to a crashing end at another, with that ghastly, his-hands-around-her-neck episode a few weeks ago, at Scott’s in Mayfair, a cafeteria to the likes of Kate and Elton.)

Rupert and Wendi’s final photo-op, by the way? Even more celebrity-spewed. There they were, in February, in L.A., at the Vanity Fair Oscar party. I was in attendance and so totally besotted by the spectre of Wendi, hugging a wall at one point as the entire star apparatus moved through the bash — Wendi, who popularized a whole other model of trophy wife, not mere accessory, or socialite plus-one, but gritty, Yale-graduated partner-in-crime — that I actually missed Jennifer
Lawrence the first time she passed by me with her Oscar in hand. And it took me a few minutes to realize that the man standing beside and laughing with Wendi was bloody Hugh Jackman. (Nota bene: while I have seen Nigella in the flesh on an occasion or two, I’ve never laid eyes on Saatchi, which perhaps says more about Saatchi than me. I’m no shut-in and Saatchi is ever-circumspect, cagey, as immune to party invitations as he famously was to Nigella’s cooking! It’s one of the ironies of this current turn in his story, that for all his high-profile-ness, he hardly ever spoke to the press, and here he finds himself speaking through them — even to his own wife!)

Dan Kitwood/Getty Images files[caption id="attachment_117723" align="aligncenter" width="620" caption="Fotolia"]<img class="size-full wp-image-117723" title="A non-replica AK-47" src="http://nationalpostcom.files.wordpress.com/2011/12/ak-47.jpg&quot; alt="" width="620" height="217" />[/caption]
Police seized a replica grenade launcher, AK-47 and ammunition from an apartment in the Jane Street and Wilson Avenue area on Thursday night.
At the time, police believed the grenade launcher was real but the AK-47 a replica; they have since determined they are both replicas.
Police say they were acting on information when they raided the apartment early Thursday evening, but no charges have been laid yet.
No arrests have been made and the investigation is ongoing.
<em>National Post</em>

Naturally, if you want the very latest on the Saatchi-Lawson affair, Page Six is on it. Just don’t expect to find ditto for the
Murdochs — the New York Post is, after all, a part of Rupert’s vast media constellation. Surprise! Not. The money alone, it perhaps goes without saying, makes these duelling divorces gawk-worthy — Anna Murdoch, the last Mrs., got a reported US$1.7-billion, plus a seat on the “board” (as did their three rivalling children together — Lachlan, James, and Elizabeth. The same privileges do not, it’s worth noting, extend to his two young daughters, Chloe and Grace, with Wendi. One of the saga’s more cursive curiosities!)

Saatchi, meanwhile, is worth big, big bucks — I mean, his art collection alone. The circus master of the young British art scene that flowered in the ’90s, he has Hirsts. Oh, does he have Hirsts.

Drip. Drip. The two divorces have spurred quite the faucet of leaks. Unsurprising! My fave hearsay in one of those Games of Thrones is the thesis, c/o Murdoch biographer Michael Wolff, that it was Rupert’s irrepressible mother, Dame Elisabeth Murdoch, who made her son’s divorce possible. Having refused to ever meet Wendi, the matriarch died just months ago — at 103 — leaving her “10% interest in the family trust to Rupert, who must hope that the few hundred million dollars … could satisfy Wendi and the terms of the pre-nup.” The incorrigible Tina Brown, meanwhile, added fuel to the fire via her Daily Beast the other day by writing that though Wendi initially gave Rupert “an extended second wind,” he began to find her too social and her accent impenetrable.

Even Under the Dome, the hit CBS event based on the Stephen King novel, can’t keep up with the disaster drama here

In that other sphere of splitsville? The splashiest news this week is that Nigella has apparently hired the sine qua non in divorce attorneys — Fiona Shackleton, who’s previously rep’ed Paul McCartney against Heather Mills, Madonna v. Guy Ritchie, and even Prince Charles in his faceoff with Diana. Shackleton’s client list speaks to the incestuousness of British haute life — as does the tidbit that Fiona is, yes, Nigella’s cousin. (Lest we forget, the Domestic Goddess went to Oxford with the likes of Hugh Grant, and is the daughter of Britain’s former Chancellor of the Exchequer.)

Possibility of a marital swap? I’m not the first to suggest it. As the Independent out of Ireland mused the other day, Wendi and Charles could be perfectly Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? together — go mano to mano, as it were. This, while Rupe — on a joyless diet for eons per Wendi’s strict instructions — could easily fall into Nigella’s conflict-adverse arms, and eat and eat and eat.

LONDON — Media mogul Rupert Murdoch has been recorded saying wrongdoing by his British newspapers was “next to nothing” and apparently acknowledging that his reporters paid police officers for information.

In a tape published in transcript by the ExaroNews journalism website and broadcast Wednesday on Channel 4 News, Murdoch is heard saying, “it’s the biggest inquiry ever, over next to nothing.”

“It’s a disgrace. Here we are, two years later, and the cops are totally incompetent,” said Murdoch, who is executive chairman of News Corp.

The outlets said the tape was recorded during a meeting with journalists at The Sun newspaper in March. Murdoch told them: “We’re talking about payments for news tips from cops: that’s been going on a hundred years.”

He also said it had been “a mistake” on the company’s part to hand over so many of its files to police. He said the company was now insisting police obtained court orders before they could see documents.

Several Sun staff have been charged as part police investigations into phone hacking and bribery spurred by the revelation two years ago that Murdoch’s News of the World routinely eavesdropped on the mobile phone voicemails of celebrities, politicians, royals and crime victims.

Murdoch told staff who have been charged that he would stand by them.

“I will do everything in my power to give you total support, even if you’re convicted and get six months or whatever,” he said.

Former staff of the News of the World, which Murdoch shut down after the hacking scandal erupted in 2011, also face trial, along with a number of police officers, prison guards and other officials accused of accepting bribes.

Murdoch has publicly apologized for phone hacking, which he has called “appalling,” and News Corp. has paid out millions to settle lawsuits from scores of victims.

News Corp. said in a statement Thursday that it had cooperated fully with police and worked hard to “identify what went wrong, compensate the victims, and ensure the same mistakes do not happen again.”

Responding to the tape recording, the company said Murdoch “has shown understandable empathy with the staff and families affected and will assume they are innocent until and unless proven guilty.”

]]>http://news.nationalpost.com/2013/07/04/on-secret-tape-media-mogul-rupert-murdoch-slams-phone-hacking-inquiry-as-over-next-to-nothing/feed/0std(FILES)News Corp Chief Rupert Murdoch (L) is driven away from the High Court in central London in this April 26, 2012 file image after Rupert Murdoch's second and final day of giving evidence at the Leveson Inquiry.Rupert Murdoch's third marriage was doomed from the start — 'jaw-dropping' events lead to couple's divorcehttp://news.nationalpost.com/2013/06/17/rupert-murdochs-third-marriage-was-doomed-from-the-start/
http://news.nationalpost.com/2013/06/17/rupert-murdochs-third-marriage-was-doomed-from-the-start/#commentsMon, 17 Jun 2013 06:19:11 +0000http://news.nationalpost.com/?p=324566

Wendi Deng, the continent-hopping, career-swapping, cream pie assailant-whacking wife of Rupert Murdoch, has proved only so adept at life on the big stage. Her talents are many, but ever since she married Rupert aboard his 155ft yacht 14 years ago, the odds have been stacked against her.

Mr Murdoch, as everyone knows, is really married to his business, and although his third wife may have given him a new lease of life, two daughters and an assisted passage into the lucrative Chinese television market, there were many in the Murdoch cosmos who failed to take kindly to her.

“What first attracted you to your elderly billionaire husband?” was the question everybody joked about asking the young Chinese bride, a one-time waitress in a Los Angeles noodle parlour. The notion of Mrs Murdoch as a dynasty-devouring dragon-floozy proved hard to shift, and last week’s news that Mr Murdoch wants a divorce on the grounds of irretrievable breakdown was surprising only in its suggestion that, when you’re 82, anything is retrievable.

The couple’s troubles – regular gossip in medialand for years – have recently seeped into the mainstream. A year ago, the New York Times announced Ms Deng’s “Declaration of Independence”, reporting that the pair lived largely separate lives, and that Mr Murdoch’s corporate lieutenants were scheming to make sure that Mrs Murdoch “is kept at a distance”.

Happily, she was right by his side when, with one virtuoso display of marital devotion, she became an overnight global sensation. In 2011, Mr Murdoch was giving stumbling evidence to a parliamentary committee investigating phone hacking, when a protester ran in from the wings and tried to splat him with a foam pie. As others watched dumbfounded, Ms Deng launched herself at the attacker and landed a fearsome, karate-style right-hander with the sound of a halibut being dropped from a vast height on to a paving stone. The prankster, one Jonnie Marbles, said later: “I saw the rage in her eyes. It was scary. I wouldn’t want a rematch.”

When you are as rich as Mr Murdoch, divorce is a costly and complex prospect. His previous wife, Anna, collected $1 billion when he divorced her in 1999, 17 days before marrying the then 30-year-old Ms Deng. It is unlikely that she will receive much less. Some Murdoch-watchers expressed surprise that the couple hadn’t settled for a simpler together-but-apart arrangement.

Am also told that undisclosed reasons for Murdoch divorcing Deng are jaw-dropping – & hate myself for wanting to know what they are

By taking the heavy option, Mr Murdoch has fed the notion that something irresolvable has happened in the background. This was given a dose of rocket fuel by the BBC’s business editor, Robert Peston, who claimed in a tweet that “the undisclosed reasons for Murdoch divorcing Deng are jaw-dropping”.

Allegations of Ms Deng’s indiscretions have flown around for years, sometimes in such profusion and detail as to suggest a deliberate smear campaign. American newspapers have, from time to time, been contacted by an anonymous tipster using the Gotham City pseudonym Harvey Dent to identify supposed lovers from the worlds of politics, big business or the movies.

STAN HONDA/AFP/Getty ImagesMedia mogul Rupert Murdoch, left, and his wife Wendi Deng, right, arrive at Time Magazine's 100 Most Influential People in the World dinner on May 8, 2008 in New York.

The greater likelihood that Ms Deng was never really cut out for life as a Murdoch, and that as her husband has aged and his power has flowed in the direction of others – particularly his grown-up children by Anna – so things have become more difficult for his outsider wife.

Photo by Jason Merritt/Getty ImagesRupert Murdoch has filed for divorce from his wife Wendi Deng seen together in 2012.

The couple met in 1997 at a time when Murdoch was trying, with uncharacteristic lack of success, to break into the Chinese media market. The story goes that Mr Murdoch was berating the troops at his Hong Kong TV headquarters when Ms Deng, a junior employee, stood up and asked: “Well, why is your China strategy so bad?”

He sought her out afterwards and was struck, not only by her confidence, but by what Vogue magazine called “the kind of looks usually reserved for a James Bond villainess”. Soon, she was not only his wife, but a key tool in his advance upon China.

Ms Deng was born in eastern China in 1968, one of four children. “I grew up in a funny little town called Xuzhou,” she has said. “In the countryside, very poor. We didn’t have hot water.” Her parents were factory engineers and convinced Communist Party members, who named her Wenge meaning “cultural revolution”. She later changed it to Wendi, but praises her mother and father for pushing her towards learning and achievement and ultimately into a medical school in Guangzhou, close to the Hong Kong border.

It was there that she met an American woman, Joyce Cherry, who taught her English and became a friend. When Mrs Cherry and her husband, Jake, returned to the US, they obtained permission for Ms Deng to accompany them and to continue her studies at California State University. Not long after arriving in Los Angeles, however, Mrs Cherry discovered that Jake and the teenage Wendi were having an affair. The Cherrys divorced. Ms Deng and Jake married. By the time it ended, just four months later, Ms Deng had decided to stay in the US.

She worked punishing hours in a Chinese restaurant to support her studies, landing a prized place at Yale Business School, and later a job at Mr Murdoch’s Star TV subsidiary. She was on a trip to drum up business in Hong Kong when the boss breezed through.

If Ms Deng’s rise rings with a certain ruthlessness, her supporters insist it is not the whole story. Many claim that her influence on Rupert has been overwhelmingly good. “She is fabulous to work with, a real pro, terrific at bringing people together,” said Tina Brown, the magazine editor.

The girl from Guangzhou has the glamour, the money and the connections, but her future seems less certain. If life as Mrs Murdoch isn’t always easy, it can be a lot harder when you are suddenly someone else.

Scott Olson/Getty ImagesRupert Murdoch, Chairman and CEO of News Corporation and his wife Wendi attend the Allen & Company Sun Valley Conference on July 8, 2011 in Sun Valley, Idaho. Allegations of Ms Deng’s indiscretions have flown around for years, sometimes in such profusion and detail as to suggest a deliberate smear campaign.

Full Comment’s Araminta Wordsworth brings you a daily round-up of top-quality punditry from around the globe. Today: Despite continuing revelations in Britain’s phone-hacking scandal, something must be working.

Journalists from Rupert Murdoch’s now-defunct News of the World have been jailed, more working for other titles face charges and victims have received up to $4-million in compensation. All this under existing laws.

But after the ponderous Leveson inquiry into phone hacking, British politicians felt they had to do something, anything. A deal was cooked up in dark of night between the three major political parties and the lobby group Hacked Off — no newspaper representatives were present.

It envisages media regulation by Royal charter, and would bring the press under state control for the first time since 1771, when John Wilkes established their right to report parliamentary proceedings uncensored. So far no major newspaper publisher has signed on.

Americans are aghast — it could never happen this side of the Atlantic because of the First Amendment guaranteeing the right of free speech.

Sadly, it’s all part of the deferential creep to the powerful and politically well connected that has made Britain such a fruitful jurisdiction for libel actions. This is also the country that invented the disgraceful super-injunction, a gag order by any other name, that sheltered such adulterers as Bank of Scotland head Fred Godwin and Top Gear presenter Jeremy Clarkson.

Writing in the National Review, John O’Sullivan says the motives are all too obvious.

With all their flaws, Britain’s newspapers — not least the despised tabloids and the Daily Mail, hated for its strong defence of middle-class values — have uncovered a series of grave public scandals, including the fraudulent misuse of parliamentary expenses by MPs, that have embarrassed the politicians and the establishment … [The Leveson inquiry] was launched because Labour and Liberal Democrat parties wanted to get revenge on the conservative tabloids that they blame for their inability to keep working-class voters on the left-liberal plantation. They saw a chance to establish a system of press control that would protect them against the tabloids in future.

Yes, there have been horrific abuses by the press. But this was already illegal: this is why so many journalists have been arrested and why so many will go to jail. No new laws are required. No political oversight is required. The Royal Charter would have done nothing to help the McCanns, Chris Jeffreys – or, indeed, Hugh Grant and Max Mosley. But it would help the ministers who want to speak softly to the press, while carrying a big stick. And anyone who thinks the loss of UK press freedom would not have any international effects should think how often Ireland is being cited as an example for our Press to accept political control.

The Daily Mirror’s Kevin Maguire is another who blames the politicians.

I know from conversations with many politicians of all parties they dislike a probing, often raucous press.
MPs’ expenses was a turning point and Parliament is to settle an old score.
MPs and Peers who defend their own free speech in the Commons and Lords don’t give a XXXX for the risks faced by people outside.
The great irony is the hacking which shut the News of the World is already illegal. Paying a policeman is a specific offence in law, punishable by prison.
The laws existed – the problem was they weren’t enforced by the cops.

Quentin Letts at the Daily Mail reports on the choleric — and chilling — response of a pro-Leveson MP.

Twelve hours after the Commons voted to kill the ancient freedoms of England’s Press, Scots-socialist lovely Jim Sheridan (Labour, Paisley) suggested that journalists who show insufficient respect to MPs should be booted off the premises.
Calling such scribes ‘a parasitical element’, he growled: ‘They abuse their position, hiding behind their pens and calling people names. I don’t know why they’re allowed here.’
Mr, Sheridan has long been one of the sketchwriting guild’s best clients. He is just such fun to describe, a hunched ball of scowling, scarlet crossness, steaming like a Chinaman’s laundry.

[T]he freedom of the press to speak truth to power: to ridicule, to satirize – even to vilify – and to expose wrongdoing.
Of course, not every businessperson or investor may personally relish the exuberance and ferocity of the British media … Like any strong detergent, the work of the British media may cause a certain smarting of the eyes. But if you want to keep clean the gutters of public life, you need a gutter press.
Since the days of Wilkes, the media have been lifting up the big, flat rocks to let the daylight in on the creepy-crawlies; and in all that time we have never come close to the state licensing of newspapers

LONDON — Media baron Rupert Murdoch has apologized for a Sunday Times cartoon depicting Israeli leader Benjamin Netanyahu building a wall using blood-red mortar, an image Jewish leaders said was reminiscent of anti-Semitic propaganda.

The political cartoon, which was published on Holocaust Memorial Day, shows Netanyahu wielding a long, sharp trowel and depicts agonized Palestinians bricked into the wall’s structure. It was meant as a comment on recent elections in which Netanyahu’s ticket narrowly won the most seats in the Israeli parliament.

“Will cementing the peace continue?” the caption read, a reference both to the stalled peace process and Israel’s separation barrier, a complex of fences and concrete walls which Israel portrays as a defense against suicide bombers but which Palestinians say is a land grab under the guise of security.

Murdoch wrote on Twitter that the cartoonist, Gerald Scarfe — a veteran artist who frequently depicts blood in his work — did not reflect the paper’s editorial line. “Nevertheless, we owe [a] major apology for [the] grotesque, offensive cartoon,” Murdoch tweeted.

Gerald Scarfe has never reflected the opinions of the Sunday Times. Nevertheless, we owe major apology for grotesque, offensive cartoon.

Jewish community leaders were particularly disturbed by parallels they saw between the red-tinged drawing and historical anti-Semitic propaganda – in particular the theme of “blood libel,” the twisted but persistent myth that Jews secretly use human blood in their religious rituals.

Their anger was heightened by the fact that the cartoon was published on a day meant to commemorate the communities destroyed by the Nazis and their allies in the mid-20th century.

The Board of Deputies of British Jews, which represents the country’s roughly 265,000-strong Jewish community, said it had lodged a complaint with the U.K. press watchdog.

The deputies said in a statement that the depiction of a Jewish leader using blood for mortar “is shockingly reminiscent of the blood libel imagery more usually found in parts of the virulently anti-Semitic Arab press.” Israel’s ambassador to Britain echoed the statement, while the speaker of Israel’s parliament, Reuven Rivlin, wrote to his U.K. counterpart to express “extreme outrage.”

Murdoch’s News International, which publishes the Times, said Scarfe was not available for comment.

In a statement, the paper’s acting editor, Martin Ivens, said that insulting the memory of Holocaust victims or invoking blood libel “the last thing I or anyone connected with the Sunday Times would countenance.”

“The paper has long written strongly in defense of Israel and its security concerns, as have I as a columnist,” Ivens said. “We are, however, reminded of the sensitivities in this area by the reaction to the cartoon, and I will of course bear them very carefully in mind in future.”

British political cartoons can be shocking to those used to tamer American drawings of donkeys and elephants slugging it out on Capitol Hill.

Distorted features, blood, and excrement are commonplace. Former Prime Minister Tony Blair, a once-popular leader whose reputation was badly damaged by his decision to support the U.S. invasion of Iraq, was often depicted with ghoulish features, sharpened fangs, or with his hands or mouth drenched in gore.

Scarfe, whose career with the Sunday Times stretches back to the 1960s, often makes use of blood in his cartoons.

The red fluid is splashed across his website and featured, for example, in a recent cartoon of Syrian leader Bashar Assad, who was pictured as a green, wraith-like creature drinking greedily from an oversized cup labeled “Children’s Blood.”

LONDON — A top counterterrorism detective was found guilty Thursday of trying to sell information to a Rupert Murdoch tabloid, becoming the first person to be convicted on charges related to Britain’s phone-hacking scandal since a police investigation was reopened in early 2011.

Detective Chief Inspector April Casburn was charged with misconduct for phoning the News of the World and offering to pass on information about whether London’s police force would reopen its stalled phone-hacking investigation.

Prosecutors said the tabloid did not print a story based on her call and no money changed hands. However, they said, she had committed a “gross breach” of the public trust by offering to sell the information.

Casburn, 53, also was accused of trying to ruin the inquiry – which centered on journalists at the now-defunct News of the World – by leaking information to the press.

The Metropolitan Police said in a statement that selling confidential information to journalists for personal gain would not be tolerated. The statement said the detective had “abused” her police position.

She betrayed the service and let down her colleagues

“Casburn proactively approached the News of the World, the very newspaper being investigated, to make money,” the police statement said. “She betrayed the service and let down her colleagues.”

The statement said vital information on the Casburn case was given to police by the Management and Standards Committee at Murdoch’s News Corp.

Casburn, who managed the Metropolitan Police terrorist financing investigation unit, had admitted contacting the newspaper but denied that she offered confidential information or sought payment.

Jurors at Southwark Crown Court found her guilty of one count of misconduct. She will be sentenced later this month.

The long-running phone-hacking scandal has led to dozens of arrests and to criminal charges against prominent journalists, including Prime Minister David Cameron’s former communications chief.

Sang Tan / The Associated PressOther public figures such as Prime Minister David Cameron's former communications chief Andy Coulson have been charged for the the phone-hacking scandal.

It has involved allegations of illegal snooping on celebrities, crime victims, politicians and others. Media mogul Murdoch closed the News of the World tabloid in July 2011 after many of its misdeeds were exposed.

Tim Wood, the News of the World news editor who took Casburn’s call, told the court she expressed concern that counterterrorism resources were being diverted to the phone-hacking investigation.

She was saying that she felt it was wrong that he was interfering in the scandal, so to speak, and she resented that

Wood also said Casburn complained of interference from former Deputy Prime Minister John Prescott, a prominent hacking victim and vocal Murdoch critic.

“The one thing that stands out in my mind is the fact that she kept going on about Lord Prescott,” Wood said. “Her saying that he was pressing for them to put charges on the News of the World, and she was saying that she felt it was wrong that he was interfering in the scandal, so to speak, and she resented that.”

A News of the World reporter and a private investigator were jailed in 2007 for hacking into the voicemails of royal aides. But the newspaper denied there was a wider problem, and a police investigation did not lead to further charges.

Police reopened the investigation in early 2011 as new evidence emerged about the scale of the law-breaking.

If you’re going to be forced from your job in disgrace after leading a giant international media firm into a national scandal, this is the way to do it.

Rebekah Brooks, the former News Corp. executive who is facing numerous charges over alleged criminality related to Britain’s telephone hacking scandal, received a payoff of $17 million when she was finally dumped by Rupert Murdoch in July 2011.

BothThe Guardian and the Financial Timesreported that the payment – at least $6 million higher than had been previously reported — was disclosed by NI Group Ltd, the UK holding company for The Sun and Times newspapers. It says an unnamed director [Brooks] received £10.852 million as “compensation for loss of office”. That money includes “various ongoing benefits” – including the funding for an office and staff in London for two years.

It also disclosed that Brooks’s legal costs will be paid for by the company. According to the FT, ongoing benefits for Brooks include “reimbursement for all legal and other professional costs incurred with ongoing investigations until those investigations are completed. The company also agreed to pay the tax associated with the legal and other professional costs.”

That could get pricey. The Guardian says Brooks is facing three sets of charges related to the hacking scandal, which came to light when it was revealed some News Corp. papers regularly hacked into private voicemails in search of stories. It reports:

She has been accused of conspiring with her husband, Charlie, and others to pervert the course of justice and frustrate an investigation by the Metropolitan police into the publisher.

She is also facing two charges in relation to conspiring to intercept the voicemails of individuals, including the mobile phone of a missing teenager, the revelation of which set off the scandal. She is also facing a charge in relation to corrupt payments allegedly made to a former Ministry of Defence official for stories, alongside the Sun’s former chief reporter John Kay.

The hacking scandal has shaken Murdoch’s UK empire. The BBC reports more than 4,000 people have been identified by police as possible victims of phone hacking by the News of the World, which Murdoch closed as a result of the scandal. It has toppled James Murdoch from his perch as heir apparent, let to prosecutions related to hundreds of cases, and prompted an inquiry into “the culture, practices and ethics” of the British press and its relationships with police and politicians. Amongh targets of the hacking attempts were “politicians, celebrities, actors, sports people, relatives of dead UK soldiers and people who were caught up in the 2007 London bombings.”

In the year to June 30 2012, according to the Financial Times, Murdoch’s British tabloid division incurred one-off costs of £46.6 million, in addition to the £160 million writedown for closing the News of the World.

Almost a quarter of the £46m in charges resulted from the payoff to Brooks, it said. Imagine what she’d have gotten if she’d actually done a good job.

It was only a matter of time before Rupert Murdoch’s opinionated Twitter feed was going to get the media mogul into trouble (again).

The outspoken Murdoch, owner of News Corp. and staunch Israel supporter, sparked controversy on Twitter Saturday when he suggested the “Jewish owned” media were being unnecessarily critical during the current crisis in Gaza.

Why Is Jewish owned press so consistently anti- Israel in every crisis?

The tweet was retweeted over 1,000 times and spurred a backlash, mostly in Twitter’s typical rolled-eyes tone. Another Murdoch tweet on Saturday, in which he asked “Can’t Obama stop his friends in Egypt shelling Israel?” was also widely mocked among political watchers.

I think Rupert is drunk tweeting tonight. "@rupertmurdoch: Why Is Jewish owned press so consistently anti- Israel in every crisis?"

Murdoch soon responded with a convoluted apology, in which it seemed he was sorry for offending Jewish reporters, without actually revoking his previous comment. The original tweet has not been removed.

Michael Wolff wrote in The Guardian said he believes Murdoch was referring to The New York Times but also suggested Murdoch, 81, has an attitude about Jews that comes from the bygone era Murdoch grew up in.

“There is, among the people around, including the many Jews around him, a real and unresolved question about what Murdoch actually thinks about the Jews,” Wolff wrote.

Hostilities between Israel and Hamas in Gaza have been ongoing for six straight days, with the Palestinian death toll now reaching 94.

Hamas has fired hundreds of rockets into Israel, killing three and injuring dozens. The conflict could escalate further if Israel chooses to launch a ground offensive.